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BidLink.net – Better than DIBBS

There must be an easier way !

In this post we’re going to quickly show you how BidLink makes it MUCH easier to find and bid the government solicitations that YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.

Anyone who’s worked with DIBBS (DLA Bid Board System) knows how frustrating it is to find government solicitations and RFQs that match your particular business.

Let’s say that you’re a distributor or reseller of “Mil-Spec” connectors, specializing in the following series…

MIL-DTL-38999
MIL-DTL-26482
MIL-DTL-24308

…and you want to review the current open solicitations from DoD and DLA for these connectors.

You can go to the DIBBS and look for all open solicitations for FSC (Federal Supply Class) 5935 (“Connectors, Electrical”) and you’ll get this….

TMI

…. 1,192 records that you can slog through to find the ones that you might wish to bid on — what else do you have to this week?

Of course, DIBBS provides other search functions and parameters that you might use to narrow down your search.

Let’s see what results we get:

Obviously, DIBBS is not the place that you want to be spending your valuable time finding and researching government solicitations that you can bid on.

May we suggest that you search for government business on BidLink?

Here’s what you would, quickly find….

Ahhh, that’s better.
(click to enlarge)

….A user-friendly interface, created solely to improve the efficiency and productivity of your government solicitations search and bidding activity.

To learn more about BidLink.net, and to try it for free, click here >> BidLink.net Free Trial

If you found this article interesting and would like to read another, we recommend this one >> DoD Procurement; Acquisition Method Codes (Part 1)

*Above DIBBS and BidLlink.net search results current to 16:30 ET, 12/19/2018.

Free Trial for BidLink
Free Trial for BidLink

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DOD adopts obsolete PDF format

Format from Adobe discontinued in 2011

On November 20, 2018, the Defense Department switched their document generation system to use an antiquated document format called Dynamic XFA (XML Forms Architecture).    XFA is not part of the PDF standard.  It was included in Adobe LiveCycle in 2002 when the company acquired Canadian service provider Accelio, who was using XFA.  This produced confusion as Adobe already had its own way of handling forms called AcroForms. 

Adobe announced the discontinuation of the Dynamic XFA format in 2011.  It is not part of the PDF 2.0 standard and is not included in their latest PDF creation tools. 

This has been causing havoc all over DOD and the private sector as people have been unable to open many military documents with anything other than Adobe Acrobat Software.  Attempting to open these files in the web browser produces this message:

“To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html”

This change affects documents from DIBBS, a primary source of solicitations and awards for the defense department.  After receiving many complaints from end-users about the format change, DIBBS released this statement:

Some suppliers have commented that they cannot open the solicitation and/or awards on DIBBS. This is not an issue with DIBBS, but your browser settings when it comes to Adobe. The following links are provided that can assist and properly setting your computer to read Acrobat Adobe documents. A way of testing this being the issue, if you can download the PDF to your local PC and then open it, then you need to update the plug-in in your browser.

Here is some info from Adobe found on the web:
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/change-in-support-for-acrobat-and-reader-plug-ins-in-modern-web-.html
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/cant-open-pdf.html

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help people who want to view the documents in a web browser instead of opening the bloated Adobe Acrobat program.  It also doesn’t help people using Macintosh or anyone who wants to open these documents on an iPad, iPhone or Android.  Shortly afterward, DIBBS began receiving complaints that their full-text search was not working.  This is likely because their own system is unable to convert these Dynamic XFA documents into something that can be searched.  When reaching out to DIBBS about the issue we received this response:

We did switch to another format due to security. This may be affecting the text search. The Tech Teams are still working to solve this. We were unaware of the original switch and have not been informed as to the solution to this yet.

The DIBBS Team

Its obvious that they have discovered the huge mistake and are attempting to resolve it.  We anticipate that they will migrate to a standardized PDF format which would resolve the above issue.  In the meantime, contractors are dealing with the inconvenience of trying to open these obscure files.  

Because the format is obsolete, there are very few tools that can work with it.  At BidLink, we have explored over a dozen different tools to potentially convert these files into normal, flat PDF files.  So far, none of these tools produce an acceptable result.  We will continue to look for solutions, but are hopeful that DOD will simply abandon Dynamic XFA entirely.